This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Once Upon a City: 111 years of the Toronto Santa Claus Parade

Toronto’s annual Santa Claus Parade, now the longest-running of its kind in the world, began in 1905 with a single ‘float’ — Santa on an Eaton’s delivery wagon. More than a century later, Santa hasn’t missed a parade.

Families from far and wide lined the streets in 1923 to see the floats of the Santa Claus parade, including the beloved Swan. (Toronto Star Archives)

The Pinocchio float makes a whale of a splash as it travels downtown streets in 1962. (Toronto Star Archives)

Santa has arrived at the parade on many different floats throughout the years. In 1921, he arrived at the Eaton’s store on a large fish, and is shown here about to begin his climb up the ladder to reach Toyland. (Archives of Ontario)

Santa climbs a long ladder from his float up to Eaton's Toyland on Yonge St. while thousands cheer him on during the 1919 parade. (Toronto Star Archives)

The final destination, Eaton's Toyland, in the 1950s, which featured a miniature train, Santa and Punkinhead colouring books, and a special mailbox for letters to the jolly one himself. (Toronto Star Archives)

By Jason BallSpecial to the Star

Thu., Nov. 12, 2015

For 110 years, despite his hectic schedule, the world’s most celebrated annual visitor has made a mid-November trek through downtown Toronto, sparking seasonal frenzies of wishing and shopping.

Santa Claus first appeared here in 1905, atop a horse-drawn Eaton’s delivery wagon emerging from Union Station, which had narrowly survived the Great Fire of Toronto the year before.

Families watched in the streets as he made his way on that single “float” to the T. Eaton Company’s flagship store on Yonge St.

In following years, he would be announced by an ever-lengthening procession of bands, clowns and floats portraying classic storybook characters and other denizens of the imaginations of children, scores of whom continue to flock annually to the streets and gape wide-eyed at the larger-than-life apparitions.

Eaton’s sponsored Toronto’s annual Santa Claus parade until 1982, long maintaining it was a show for children and eschewing the display of the company name amidst the decorations.

Article Continued Below

The parade is now the longest-running of its kind in the world and has become a defining event for the city, ushering in the holiday season and invoking the spirit of generosity.

Children lining the route in 1988 break into frantic waving and cheers as Santa Claus gets closer. (Mike Slaughter)

“The annual parade, which is an annual triumph, was this year, as it was last year and the year before, bigger and better than ever,” trumpeted the Toronto Daily Star in 1941. “Always new but never new, always changing but never changing, it’s a thousand to one bet that this show brings more genuine thrills to Toronto children than any other.”

Half a million attended that year, 10 times the number of spectators four years earlier. By 1954, “nearly a million” lined the parade route, according to the Star.

Indeed, during wartime, the promise of yuletide indulgence loomed poignantly for many Toronto families as the reward for another year of stolid sacrifice.

“Nobody noticed (Santa Claus’s 14) tractors, but this was the first time in five years the show of shows used gasoline engines,” the Star reported in 1945, when the Second World War had ended. “There was something special about the 42nd annual parade . . . It seemed to Santa that grown-ups cheered his passage like children, as if his coming heralded the first real Christmas since 1938.”

For thousands of children, want was a never-ending reality, the paper pointed out year after year, typically closing parade coverage with an appeal for donations to the Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund, established in 1906, which provided Christmas presents for 300 underprivileged children its first year and now distributes 45,000 gift packages throughout the GTA.

Santa waves to the crowds lining the parade route on Nov. 20, 1926.

In 1913, Santa famously arrived with live reindeer from Labrador, which retired after the parade to an Eaton executive’s property outside Toronto.

That year, the Star told the tale of Barefoot Johnny and Mary “McJones,” whose eldest sister, Ellen, tried to solve the problem “that Santy Claus won’t come here” by selling 15 cent brooches so she could buy a gift for her little sister.

“If she sold enough, she would get a doll,” the Star posited, but drew grim conclusions.

“The souvenir brooch idea has been a failure. People in the neighbourhood where the McJoneses live are not given to buying cheap jewelry . . . The family’s only hope of a bright Christmas rests with generous outsiders.”

If charity was a seasonal fetish for some of Toronto’s fortunate, making parade magic would become a yearlong, even lifelong devotion for others.

Eaton’s PR man Jack Brockie made it his mission to oversee all aspects of the parade from 1928 until his retirement in 1963, ensuring it remained unsullied by promotion or politicking. By 1969, the company budgeted “something in excess of $100,000 annually” for the world-famous celebration, the same amount the Star speculated to be the salary of the new company president.

The Mother Goose float in 1930, 13 years after its debut.

When the Star caught up with him in July of 1968, float builder Jim Carmichael had been toiling full-time over his parade creations for 17 years.

“Each float takes about three to four weeks to build, another week or two to decorate. The figures are changed from year to year, but we try to use the forms again to cut down on time,” the craftsman explained, pointing at the remains of last year’s elephant. “It’ll be a hippo this year. For some reason kids remember the big animal floats more than any others.”

Carmichael retired in 1982, after more than three decades as a float builder. A team of dedicated builders and designers still works year-round on the floats.

Throughout the event’s history, the Star has witnessed efforts on every scale to share the wonder of the Santa Claus parade with as many children as possible.

“Ninety-three children, most of them from the back concessions of northern Ontario” were brought to Toronto by train for the 1939 parade and “spent the day thrilling at the sights,” including “the Star building, where they visited the newsroom and saw the huge presses.”

Jim Carmichael spent more than three decades as a float builder for the Santa Claus Parade before retiring in 1982.

Busloads of sick kids have attended, year after year, thanks to tireless non-profit organizations.

And for those who could not be there in person, a narration was broadcast from the early days of radio, beginning with CFRB in the 1930s.

CBC first televised the parade in 1952, with the first colour broadcast coming 10 years later; by the 1970s, 30 million viewers across North America watched the telecast.

When Eaton’s withdrew funding for the parade in 1982, deeming the cost unjustifiable in light of ongoing layoffs, a non-profit was quickly formed to keep the event going, led by businessman George Cohon, founder and CEO of McDonald’s Canada and later, Russia.

In 1989, just as the USSR was crumbling and a new warmth was being felt across previously icy borders, 250 million Russians watched the parade for the first time via the Soviet Gosteleradio network.

Since 1982, the parade’s Celebrity Clown program has helped to secure a portion of the event budget. Every year, more than 150 or so “clowns” donate $1,200 to lead the parade and greet families along the route. For $500, “junior” clowns can join in the fun.

Thousands fill Yonge St. outside the Eaton's store for the Santa Claus parade in this 1940s photo. In 1941, half a million people attended the event, 10 times the number of spectators just four years earlier.

Additional funding comes from numerous corporate sponsors, which are represented in the roughly 30 parade floats each year.

The parade remains symbolic of big wishes coming true, especially for children in Toronto who face great challenges.

“When Helena Kirk got leukemia, she watched the Santa Claus Parade as it passed by SickKids Hospital,” the Star wrote this time last year. “This weekend, the cancer-free youngster will be a crystal princess on the Swarovski float.”

“It’s pretty nice to be on the other side, let’s put it that way,” her mother told the Star.

This Sunday, Nov. 15, as Santa Claus glides like a crimson cinder across grey city streets, he will rekindle in hundreds of thousands of hopeful hearts a vision of Christmas: the gleam of possible gifts, through the drizzle of deepening winter.

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com